A mostly insightful slice of life and death, but not on the level of Mary Roach’s Stiff (2003).
An often funny, yucky examination of how the dead can affect our lives.
For a few months in 1969, Wilkins worked in Toronto digging graves for Willowlawn Everlasting Inc. The experience had a profound effect on the young man. Working in a graveyard with horse manure, religious fanatics and dead bodies while periodically whacked out on marijuana is bound to leave a lasting impression. The book’s title—which refers to the fact that fingernails may continue to grow after death—is indicative of the author’s jaunty attitude toward the subject. But for Wilkins, death wasn’t even the primary aspect of the job; it was more about the oddness of his fellow gravediggers, the questionable business practices of the Willowlawn brain trust and the pervasive sense of greed and cynicism that pervaded the industry. “[U]nder the customary Monday morning cloud of laziness, pettiness, halitosis, chaos, and inertia,” writes the author, “three of four other lowly employees trudge off with the enthusiasm of ripening stiffs to begin their temporary spiritless bottom-feeding bonehead jobs, their only consolation being that, even in 90 degrees of heat, work in the cemetery is relatively easy and that if they’re resourceful they can sleep two or three hours a day under the honeysuckles out by the paupers’ graves.” Considering that there are only a handful of books that deal with this aspect of death, fans of the macabre should appreciate this oddball memoir. However, because of the repetitive nature of the job, readers not interested in the picayune machinations of the cemetery world might find themselves wishing for a Stephen King novel.
A mostly insightful slice of life and death, but not on the level of Mary Roach’s Stiff (2003).Pub Date: July 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-60239-709-5
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Skyhorse Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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